Miles: Maddon a perfect fit for Cubs

Joe Maddon's introductory news conference as manager of the Cubs on Monday felt a lot like a new-age revival meeting.

Maddon tossed out terms like "60 is the new 40" and "don't ever permit the pressure to exceed the pleasure."

And to top it all off, Maddon, Cubs president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer got much of their job interviewing done in the back of an RV on the beach near Pensacola, Florida.

But Cubs fans want only one thing, and Maddon didn't let them down, at least as far as promise-making went.

"Listen, for me, I'm already talking playoffs for next year," Maddon said as spoke before a large group of both local and national media members at the Cubby Bear, a tavern across the street from Wrigley Field.

"It's all about setting your standards, your goals high, because the problem if you don't set them high is you might actually hit your mark.

"We need to set our mark high, absolutely. I'm going to talk playoffs. I'm going to talk World Series. This year I am. I promise you. And I'm going to believe it."

The Cubs made things official Monday, naming Maddon the franchise's 54th manager and signing him to a five-year contract worth a reported $25 million.

It has been an awkward 10 days for the Cubs and Maddon, who opted out of his 2015 contract with the Tampa Bay Rays. Amid speculation the Cubs would hire Maddon, they fired manager Rick Renteria after Renteria spent only one year on the job.

The hiring of Maddon gives the Cubs their first big-name manager since Lou Piniella (2007-10), and it comes at a time when Epstein's massive rebuilding project is showing signs of bearing fruit.

"We didn't hire him because he's a big-ticket manager," Epstein said. "We hired him because he's Maddon."

The 60-year-old Maddon, who joked that his next birthday would make him 41, acknowledged that he liked having the "crazy" tag attached to his name.

"You have to be a little bit crazy to be successful," he said later with a smaller group of writers.

Maddon is known to keep things loose for his players in the clubhouse. He's well-read and an animal lover. He also said he believes pregame work is overrated and that there will be days when the Cubs don't go at it full-bore during batting practice.

To please the new-school analytical types, Maddon said he carries a card in his back pocket during games, and that card is "dripping" with analytical information.

But it's not all stat-geekery, even for an organization that's big on analytics.

"He's a combination of all things," Epstein said. "This is an old-school baseball guy here with a wealth of knowledge."

Maddon has a career winning percentage of .517, including stints as an interim manager with the Angels in 1996 and 1999. He became manager of the Rays in November 2005 and got to the postseason with the low-budget team four times, including the 2008 World Series, in which the Rays fell to the Philadelphia Phillies.

Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer began a whirlwind courtship with Maddon right after he became a managerial free agent.

"Theo and Jed came on down," Maddon said. "We kind of sat behind the 'Cousin Eddie.' That's an RV, the 'Cousin Eddie' 43-foot Winnebago. We sat back there and pretty much talked philosophy, about how this is all going to work.

"For me, that was the most important thing. That's what I needed to know, that we were philosophically aligned. It had nothing to do with anything other than that.

"This conversation was more like a validation, a verification that we've always thought pretty much the same way and that we could coexist to make this whole thing work. So it was a relatively easy conversation, and it led to this moment."

At the end of the day, literally, Maddon said the introduction went about as expected, even though the news conference didn't take place in Wrigley Field, which is being renovated. More than once, Maddon called the ballpark a "cathedral."

"It's been pretty darn special," he said. "It exceeded expectations. I really anticipated probably doing something in the ballpark. But once I found out it was in the Cubby Bear, which I had never been to but heard about, to have a press conference in a cool bar, it doesn't get much better than that."

And, yes, Maddon did offer to buy drinks for the house.

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